


Just breathe

by morpholomeg



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:55:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28390497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morpholomeg/pseuds/morpholomeg
Summary: Once again, a leisure trip in the TARDIS turns into a mission to help. Yaz is on search and rescue, looking for a lost child, but soon finds she needs rescuing herself. In the meantime, Graham and Ryan grapple with the local culture, and the Doctor has to decide at what point she must let go of her hope. Five and a half hours might not be long enough this time...(alt summary: author spends 15k getting Yaz and the Doctor to hug)
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan, Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> It's episode fic! I wanted to write a story they could never afford to do on TV. Spoilery warning that a major character is thought to be dead for a significant chunk of this story.

“So! Where next?”

Ryan and Yaz looked at each other. “Uh…”

“Oh come on!” The Doctor was practically bouncing. “Every time we go through this - you need to start preparing your answers!”

“Oi, I’ve got a notebook now,” Graham protested. He took a little notepad out of his jacket pocket and started flicking through a few pages. “Right, I’ve got categories. How are we feeling - actual historical events or random inspirational words I’ve got jotted down?”

“Random inspiration,” said Ryan.

Graham dutifully flicked to the next page and said, grandly, “Blob.”

There was a pause, but nothing else seemed forthcoming. “I’m sorry,” began Yaz. “Did you just say ‘blob’?”

“Yup. Can’t remember what the inspiration was for that one now. But hey, Doc, I’m sure you can come up with something from that, right?”

The Doctor’s face was alive with glee. “Oh, I can come up with hundreds of destinations from that, Graham. You need to narrow it down.”

“I’ll narrow it down,” said Ryan. “Blob, and some alien place where everything looks… really alien. Like, a lot of the people we’ve met, they look kind of similar to us, you know? It would be really cool to meet people who look really, properly alien.”

“But only if we’re not gonna cause any, like, intergalactic incidents,” Yaz interjected. “I don’t wanna walk in and ruin something.”

The Doctor leapt up to the console. “See, this is helpful! Blob, aliens who look nothing like humans, but who have seen humanoids before - I know exactly where we’re going now. Hold onto your hats!”

~

The world they stepped out onto was beautiful. The sky was a milky pink colour, and the ground beneath them rock solid, like walking on concrete. It was mostly blue in colour, although with some turquoise patches here and there, and it shone in the gentle ambient light. A few hundred yards away were buildings - or perhaps just walls? They sat in front of a mountain, but a mountain like nothing on Earth: so narrow and tall at its top that it looked artificial, like a skyscraper. The side closest to them was pure carbon black, but as it curved away, it lightened through maroon to red. Each jutting, sheer rockface was a slightly different colour, a new gleaming façade like a gemstone.

“Welcome to Jasapol!” said the Doctor. “Lovely planet. That right over there is Jasapol proper, home to the native population. There’s only a very small number of them despite the size of the planet, so the rest of it is mostly inhabited by refugees in various colonies scattered around the place.”

“That’s why they’ve seen humanoids before,” said Ryan.

The Doctor span around and pointed at him. “Point to Ryan! Great people, the Jasapods, very civilised. Love a bit of art, music, dance. This planet used to be a gas giant but it condensed very suddenly billions of years ago. Very unusual, resulted in a planet with lots of different ecosystems, massive variations in temperature, in the formation of the planet surface, even in the composition of the air, to some degree. See the way the floor is shining? Not a reflection, it’s emanating from the ground - this sector condensed out of various luminous substances. Each colony on the planet is matched to the local gas pockets, depending on the refugees’ species. There’s an area on the other side of the planet, absolutely swimming in CO 2 , mostly populated by trees. Lovely people, met one at the end of the world once.”

“Tree… people?”

“Yes, keep up, Yaz!”

“At the end of the world?”

“Not for ages, Graham, chillax!”

Ryan caught Yaz’s eye. “Chillax?” he mouthed.

“Anyway! Come on, you wanted to meet interesting new people, stop jibber-jabbering and off we go!”

Yaz grinned and skipped forward, trying to keep up. “So, loving the alien geology,” she said. “Where do the blobs come in?”

“Trust me, you’ll see the blobs,” said the Doctor. “Although, possibly a bit offensive. We’ll avoid the b-word from now on.”

Yaz pressed her lips together to suppress a giggle. The Doctor didn’t seem to notice.

“We’re in the thirty second century,” she announced. “Humans have spread out across the universe, travelled far and wide. I don’t think there’s a human colony on the planet at this very moment, but there’ll definitely be some sort of humanoid settlement here by now.”

“I love that,” said Yaz.

“Uh, s’not always good though, is it, humans travelling places they didn’t come from,” Ryan pointed out. “Didn’t always go so well on Earth.”

“No denying that,” said the Doctor. “But, well, hashtag not all humans. The sort of people who end up here, they’re the people who couldn’t stay in their homes. These are not the villains in their stories.”

“What are we then?” said Graham. “Are we playing asylum seekers?”

“Why can’t we just tell the truth?” asked Ryan. “We’re tourists.”

“Vacay!” Yaz crowed.

The Doctor took a second. “Vay...cay…”

“Shun,” Graham finished. “Vacation. It’s youth speak, Doc, don’t worry about it.”

“Oi, I’m down with youth speak! See! ‘Down with’! I know the lingo!”

Ryan sniggered, but they had arrived at the city walls. Yaz reached out to touch one, curious, and found it rougher under her fingertips than the ground. It looked calcified, or fossilised, or something - Yaz wasn’t a scientist, but it looked like a natural process had created the surface, not human intervention.

Or Jasapod intervention, she reminded herself.

“There’s no gate,” Graham noted. “Just gaps.”

“Right you are!” said the Doctor. “You get walled cities throughout the universe - there are dozens of towns just on Earth called  _ medina  _ or  _ mdina  _ or the equivalent. Usually they’re designed for defence, with great big gates you can close if you’re under siege, but not here. Tell you what’s a universal constant though…” She looked up and down the empty path they were now on just inside the walls. “Nothing ever happens in the suburbs. Come on, let’s go and find a tourist information office.”

“Tourist information?” Ryan scoffed. 

“Don’t knock it,” Graham warned him. “You kids with your smartphones, you don’t know how good those places are. I went interrailing when I was a youngster, all round Europe, and we did it by getting off the train and going straight to the tourist info office in every new town. Maps, recommendations for B&Bs, you got it all there.”

“Bit quiet, isn’t it?” Yaz said. “No one out and about.”

“Maybe we’ve hit the middle of the workday,” the Doctor suggested. “Or the middle of a religious service, or the middle of the night, or the middle-”

“Of something else,” Ryan interrupted, before she could really build up steam.

“Exactly!”

The buildings they passed were all made of the same sort of material as the city walls, some thick and solid, some thinner and sort of gappy. “They can’t have much rain,” Yaz said.

Graham squinted upwards. “I don’t think they have much of an atmosphere.”

“You can say that again,” said Ryan. “Where is everyone?”

“Here we are!” said the Doctor. “Tourist information!”

Graham had no idea how she knew this, there was no sign that he could see. The colour of the walls - a sort of coral pink - was maybe a bit mottled at eye height, so maybe that was an indicator? He followed the others into the building and - wow.

Blob was right. The creature - person - Jasapod behind the counter was about five foot high and resembled nothing so much as a massive blob of viscous slime, topped with a fringe of a dozen tentacles, each around a foot in length. There was no discernible face, no obvious eyes or mouth. It - he? - she? - they? - the Jasapod was pale green in colour, and had what looked like a coral necklace twined around the base of its tentacles. It might have been a crown of some sort, or a prisoner tag, or anything at all.

“Hello!” said the Doctor brightly. “I’m the Doctor, and these are my mates, Graham, Ryan, and Yaz. We’re tourists. On tour. Lads on tour - except we’re not all lads. What’s your name?”

“I am Beshot,” said the alien. “Local historian here in Jasapol.” They slid slowly out from behind the counter.

Ryan couldn’t help but stare. With no mouth, he had no idea how the alien was speaking, but he was definitely hearing words. He didn’t know which side of the alien was the front, or even if there was a front.

“Nice to meet you,” he offered weakly.

“Likewise, I am sure,” said Beshot.

This time, Ryan was expecting speech, and watching closely. The edges of the alien seemed to blur as he heard words and he realised: vibrations. The alien was making their whole body vibrate to create sound. God, the TARDIS must be working overtime to translate that into English.

“It’s so nice to see tourists come to our city,” the Jasapod continued. “I would offer you refreshment, but we haven’t had humanoids through Jasapol in a while, we’ve nothing here for you.”

“No worries,” said Graham. “Got a sandwich in me pocket, always prepared.”

“Oh, Graham, a word?” The Doctor grabbed his elbow and whispered in his ear. “The Jasapods consider all animal life sacred, so I wouldn’t get the sandwich out if it’s not vegan.”

Graham frowned. “Right. Thanks for the warning.”

“You’re welcome!” she said brightly, missing the sarcasm entirely. “So, Beshot, like I said - tourists, us. What would you recommend we see?”

Beshot drew themself up proudly - or at least Graham imagined it was proudly, heavens only knew when it came to alien blobs - becoming rather thinner in the process. “Well, you must stop by the theatre and take in an opera,” they said. “But as a historian, I must also recommend that you join us in the council hall this evening for our daily remembrance. If you want to learn about Jasapol, that’s the best way to do it.”

“And - couldn’t help noticing, seems a bit quiet out today,” said the Doctor. “Have we arrived in the middle of - anything?”

Beshot’s tentacles wiggled. Presumably that was something akin to a facial expression on this planet. “Yes indeed, you have arrived in the middle of our elections. Voting traditionally takes place from dusk onwards, so most in the city will be in repose this morning. The result will be announced later this afternoon, before the remembrance.”

“What is the daily remembrance?” asked Yaz. “Sounds fascinating.”

“The recounting of our history,” said Beshot. “Forgive my curiosity, but I understand many cultures remember their history through mark-making, is that the case for you?”

“Yeah, for the most part,” said Yaz. “We call it writing. I’m guessing you have oral history?”

“Not just oral,” the Doctor butted in. “Didn’t I tell you, the Jasapods are some of the best artists this side of the galaxy - you should see them dance. Well, you’re going to see them dance!”

“Our children are taking the lead this evening,” said Beshot. “They’re off on a school trip now, rehearsing out of the way of the town.”

“I feel like I’m on a school trip,” Ryan muttered.

“You’re right, let’s get going!” said the Doctor cheerily. “Thanks for the intro, Beshot. Come on, fam -” But she cut herself off, throwing her arms akimbo and crouching close to the ground. “Can you feel that?”

Yaz looked around. “Feel what?”

The Doctor blinked at her, and then straightened up, slightly sheepish. “My mistake. Hasn’t happened yet. So hopefully we’ve got time to-”

And then the bomb exploded.

~

It wasn’t immediately obvious what had happened - a large bang, a jolting tremor, a blast of wind - and Graham looked around wildly.

“What the-”

The Doctor was like a pointer dog, eyes fixed on a mark, despite that mark apparently being through several walls. “That was deliberate, some sort of explosive. Beshot, what’s in that direction?”

“Er, the landing pad,” they answered. “Just outside the city walls. There won’t be anyone there this time of day.”

She had her sonic out now, running out of the tourist information office into the street and scanning in the direction from which the noise had come. A couple of Jasapods were emerging into the street too, and Ryan was clambering back to his feet - the blast had knocked him to the ground.

“You alright?” Yaz asked him, and he nodded.

“Yeah. Man, thought this was supposed to be a holiday.”

The Doctor scowled at her sonic. “I’m not picking anything up. We need to get everyone together, into a place of safety. D’you have an assembly point? A town hall, maybe?”

Beshot had followed them out into the street, sliding along at a pace which could only be described as sedate. “Yes, we have our council hall,” they said. Their voice was calm, but the tips of their tentacles were shivering, and they weren’t as tall any more - on closer inspection, Graham realised that they had flattened themself a bit closer to the ground, so they were now shorter and squatter.

“Well, lead the way!”

More Jasapods joined them as they made their way towards the council hall. Each was a slightly different colour and shape, but that was about all they had in the way of distinguishing features. Some had accessories like Beshot’s coral necklace, but most did not. Ryan really was trying not to stare, but he kept coming up with new questions: how long did they live? How did they do anything with no limbs? How much control did they have over the movement of their tentacles? There was no way of knowing without asking a lot of really rude questions.

Or were they rude? Maybe the Jasapods wouldn’t care.

The town itself seemed to be made on curved lines, a series of concentric circles. The council hall was at the centre, a wide open space. Not quite a perfect circle but an ellipse, with many gaps in the walls, and taller than the other buildings in the town so the top third of the mountain was the only thing visible outside. Through the gaps, streams of Jasapods came, all moving at a slow and steady pace, but with tentacles twitching and twirling wildly.

“There aren’t many, are there?” said Yaz. She was up on tiptoes, watching the crowd. “Maybe - a couple hundred?”

“Let’s hope that’s how many there are supposed to be,” said the Doctor, suddenly grim. “Where are the children?”

And now Ryan was looking - yes, there were only a couple of small Jasapods, teeny tiny little ones. “Beshot said school trip,” he said.

“All of them?” Graham asked.

Yaz tried to do the maths in her head. “With a population this size - maybe?”

“Beshot!” said the Doctor. “The kids, the school trip - anywhere near the landing pad?”

“No, around a quarter of the way further round the mountain,” they said. “They are probably returning as we speak.”

“Rather not take any chances with that,” said the Doctor. She spun back to the fam and clapped her hands. “Right, here’s the plan,” she said. “Graham, I want you talking to the locals. Find out as much as you can - anything out of the ordinary, anyone acting suspicious, Jasapods or aliens that might have come through.”

“Right-o.”

“Yaz, you’re looking for that missing school trip. Take one of the locals with you.”

“Search and rescue, right up my street.”

“And Ryan, you’re with me. Whatever caused that quake, it hasn’t given out any electrical signals, so it’s either chemical or purely mechanical.”

“NVQ mechanics coming through,” he said.

“And off we go!”

Graham blinked, and found himself alone. “Kids,” he muttered. He withdrew his little notebook from his pocket and flipped to a new page. “Right. Detective Inspector O’Brien, reporting for duty.”

~

The Jasapod that Yaz had commandeered into taking her on the rescue mission, a turquoise-ish individual named Jishat, was achingly slow. Yaz was reminded of a slug, the way they slid across the ground, their body stretching out slightly behind them to form a sort of tail.

“Pardon my asking,” she said, “but is that the fastest you can move?”

“It is indeed,” they replied.

There was no real change in their body shape or the movement of their tentacles, so Yaz decided they probably weren’t offended. She swallowed. “Right, thank you. So, where exactly were the kids headed for their trip?”

“The side of the mountain where the rocks become orange,” Jishat answered. “There is a cavern a small way inside which is perfectly shaped for concerts. I was once the star performer, when I was a child.”

“Right, the rehearsal for remembrance,” said Yaz. “Sounds dead fascinating, I hope we get to see it.”

“So do I,” said Jishat. They paused. “My child is the soloist tonight.”

Yaz looked over at them. “Oh, you should have said. And they’re on this school trip?”

All of Jishat’s tentacles swayed together, perhaps their equivalent of nodding their head.

“We’ll find ‘em,” said Yaz. “I promise.”

The effects of the blast were clearer to see this close to the mountain. The smooth, gemstone floor had fine cracks in it, creating lightning bolt patterns sparking out towards the town. Jishat slowed even more as they moved over them, and Yaz could hear them making a sort of clicking sound, like -

“Dolphins,” she said.

“Hm?”

“Never mind,” she replied hastily. Echolocation, that was what it was called. That answered a question though - if they could see conventionally, with photoreceptors and the like, then their field of vision didn’t extend to ground level. Yaz eyed the tentacles again.

“There’s the entrance,” said Jishat.

Every cave that Yaz had ever seen or imagined was dark inside, so she had been looking for shadows in the rockface. Now Jishat pointed it out, she realised her mistake: the rocks themselves were luminescent. Not as bright as the sun, so it probably was darker within the mountain, but here at the entrance, the cave fairly glowed.

She was so entranced by this that she almost didn’t notice the cracks in the floor widening. Her toes warned her before her eyes caught up: the entrance into the mountain was cut off by a narrow chasm, perhaps a metre wide.

She rocked back, just as Jishat said, “Ah. I won’t be able to go on.”

Yaz turned, and spotted the problem immediately. Jishat’s - foot? Well, it worked for slugs - their foot was probably only a metre long, so there was no way they could slide right on over. “Of course. I can though. Advantages of having legs, I guess.”

She looked again at the cave. As potential death-traps went, it didn’t look too bad. The entire mountain glowed, just like the ground where they’d first arrived, but in red-orange tones rather than blue-green. The passageway was wide, with decent headroom; she would be able to walk upright.

“Right,” she said. “We’ll have to split up. I’ll go in and look for the kids. You’ll have to go and find something we can use to bridge this gap, like a section of wall we could lay down.”

“Alright,” said Jishat. “Be careful. There’s a cavern under the middle of this mountain. If any more cracks like these have opened up, it could be a very long drop.”

Yaz swallowed. “Got it.”

She looked down into the chasm. It glowed orange, making it impossible to judge how deep it might be. Still, it was only a metre across, and she had grippy trainers on - an easy jump.

“I’ll meet you back here, okay?” she said to Jishat. “With the kids, if I can.”

“I’ll be here,” said Jishat. “Protect our children, Yaz.”

There was no way that Yaz could meet this parent’s eye, because they didn’t have one. She couldn’t clasp their shoulder, or offer a handshake. She felt a sudden urge to bow, but how would that translate for a creature without a spine?

So in the end she just took a deep breath, and leapt into the mountain.

~

The bombsite was obvious once Ryan and the Doctor reached it - a great gaping hole in a black rockface. It was only fifty metres or so away from the first piece of metal Ryan had seen since they arrived: a large, flat platform sitting close to the surface. Nearby, a railway track began and stretched into the distance, away from the town. Neither had been particularly damaged.

“That must be the landing pad, yeah?” said Ryan. “And I guess the aliens go straight on the train.”

“Must be,” the Doctor agreed. “But come and look at this!”

She had her whole head practically in the bombsite; Ryan kind of expected her to emerge with a sooty nose. He approached somewhat more cautiously.

“It’s just… rocks,” he said.

“Exactly!” said the Doctor. “Big rocks, small rocks, shards of rock - but nothing else. No metal fragments, no shrapnel, it is literally just rocks.”

“Different rocks, though,” Ryan pointed out. “A lot more colourful than the actual mountain.”

And it was - it could have been a decorative rock garden, before it got blown up. There were dozens of rocks, some as small as a tennis ball, others as large as footballs, and in every shade of the rainbow. Add a few flowers poking up here and there, and Ryan wouldn’t have been surprised to see it on the telly at Chelsea.

The Doctor slapped her forehead. “Ryan Sinclair, you’re a genius!”

“Am I?”

“Different rocks!” she exclaimed. She flung herself to her knees and started scanning again with the sonic. “Ohhh, that’s clever,” she breathed. “Of course it’s not showing up on my scans.”

“Why not?” asked Ryan.

“Because it’s all naturally occurring,” she explained. “Look - that turquoise rock there, that’s exactly like the ground where we parked the TARDIS. That red one, that must be from the other side of the mountain. Purple - haven’t seen it yet, but it must be relatively local. And I’m not familiar enough with the planet to spot the conflicting readings. Should have had the Jasapods check them, probably.”

“You’d have to teach them to understand your systems first,” Ryan pointed out.

“But this is presumably a bit of an explosive mix of chemicals,” the Doctor continued, ignoring him. “Stack it right next to this massively volatile black rockface, add a bit of kinetic energy by dropping something from a height - say, from that ledge about twenty feet above us -”

Ryan looked up. Yep, there it was.

“ - and things go boom.”

Ryan turned slowly on the spot, looking at their surroundings. “So do we think they were going for the landing pad?” he asked.

“It’s the only significant bit of infrastructure round here,” the Doctor agreed. “Although they clearly didn’t anticipate such a small blast radius, they haven’t hit it at all. Here, hold this,” she said, dumping a pile of rock fragments into his arms, “I want to take it back to the TARDIS to analyse.”

Ryan yelped. “Did you just give me a bomb?!”

“Just don’t drop it and you’re fine!”

“Doctor, I have dyspraxia!”

That got her attention. She grimaced, biting her lip - like, taking her entire bottom lip between her teeth. Ryan had never seen anyone actually do that in real life. “Oh yeah. Sorry. Here.” She took a few of the rock fragments off the pile. “Let’s sort these all out into separate piles, clean it up before someone else stumbles into it. Plus it’ll give Graham a bit more time to investigate.”

~

Graham had found out a great deal about the prevailing belief system on Jasapol; his ham sandwich was feeling like a lead weight in his pocket. A slightly smelly one, too - the mayonnaise might have been a bad idea.

“Yes, I know you value peace and life above all else,” he said for the fifth time. “Your friend over there has already told me. Very respectable. What I want to know is if there’s anyone here who doesn’t. Maybe one of the refugees you’ve been taking in, maybe tourists like me?”

But every time, the answer was no.

“We are careful to protect our way of life,” said one. “The refugees who come here are received through an asylum seeking scheme, run by the Shadow Proclamation. We have set criteria that the migrants must meet before travelling to Jasapol, including a disavowal of all violence. If they have ever hurt or killed another sentient creature except in the most obvious cases of self-defence, they are not allowed onto the planet.”

“Specifically a sentient creature?” Graham questioned. “I thought any creature would be too much.”

The Jasapod’s outmost tentacles twitched. “It has been discussed. But too many creatures in the galaxy rely on food sources provided by other species from their planets. We ask that they reduce their use of these to a minimum.”

“And everyone’s happy with that?” he prodded.

“It has been settled,” said the Jasapod.

That seemed to be all he was getting, so he nodded. “Right, thanks for your time. Much obliged.”

He looked around the room, trying to find someone he hadn’t spoken to yet. The problem was that a lot of the Jasapods looked quite similar to his human eyes. The adults were all roughly the same size and shape, and they all seemed to have roughly the same number of tentacles. Even worse, they changed shape constantly, contracting and expanding as they spoke, and their colours fluctuated too. They all seemed to have a base colour, but if your base was orange, they could pale to yellow or darken all the way through to maroon according to - well, Graham wasn’t sure. Their mood?

He wandered up to a blue individual with a green coral necklace-y thing. “Hiya,” he said. “I’m Graham, trying to help work out what happened out there. What’s your name?”

“I am Foshol,” said the Jasapod. “President of Jasapol.”

Graham raised his eyebrows. “Gosh, nice to meet you, President.”

“Nice to meet you too, Graham,” said Foshol. “I hope you can help us, this isn’t the way we wanted to end our administration.”

“Of course, the election!” said Graham. “Well, at least you can blame it on the opposition, eh?”

“That’s not really how politics work here,” said Foshol. They were somewhat taller than the average Jasapod in the room, but who knew if that was their normal shape or just because they were standing up straight. “We govern by discussion and consensus. The President and the two Vice Presidents have the final say, but it must be in discussion with the populace.”

“Good system, if everyone agrees,” said Graham.

Foshol’s tentacles dipped. “Indeed.”

“So, President Foshol, have you heard anyone disagreeing recently? Any dissidence in the population?”

The President hesitated. Their tentacles twitched.

“That looks like a yes,” Graham prodded.

“Some of the discussions before voting were a little more divided than perhaps is typical,” Foshol conceded.

Graham huffed. “That’s a politician’s answer if ever I heard one.” He flipped to a new page in his notebook. “What was the issue?”

~

As Yaz made her way through the tunnel, she could feel a steady vibration through the thin soles of her trainers. She put a hand to the wall and felt it there too.

“That bodes well,” she muttered.

But as she rounded the last corner into the rehearsal room, the vibrations suddenly resolved themselves into song. It happened as soon as she saw the first Jasapod child, so perhaps the translation didn’t kick in without - the tentacle movements? The colour changes? Something visual, anyway. Definitely an argument in favour of photoreceptors.

_ “And so we welcome one and all,”  _ they sang, _ “to our home in Jasapol!” _

“Hi everyone,” said Yaz.

The little crowd of thirty or so children stopped singing all together. There was a moment of quiet, and then they all spoke over each other.

“Who are you?”

“What are you?”

“Are you here to rescue us?”

Yaz laughed. “I’m Yaz, I’m a human, and yes, I’m here to rescue you. I guess you saw the gap in the floor at the entrance?”

There was one larger Jasapod with the group, a blue character without any adornments on their tentacles. “Yes. I went with a couple of the children to see if we could get out, but when it became clear that we couldn’t, I thought it best to come back here.”

“Good plan,” said Yaz. “I came here with Jishat, so they’ve gone back to the town to find a bridge of some kind. Hopefully by the time we get back to the entrance, we’ll be all set to get you guys home.”

“But what about Jishol?” said one small pink Jasapod.

Yaz looked around. “Jishol? Who’s Jishol?”

“Jishol is our soloist,” said the teacher. “Jishat’s child. They were rehearsing on their own, and they’re trapped a bit further inside.”

“Another gap?”

“Here!” “Look, over here!”

Yaz came over to the other side of the cavern and sure enough, there was another deep crack in the floor. This one was narrower than the one at the edge of the mountain, only perhaps eighty centimetres, but still far too wide for a Jasapod to slide over.

“And I’ll bet you haven’t managed to speak to them,” she said. “If they can’t see you…” She straightened up. “Right, so this is what we’re going to do. We’ll all head out to the entrance and get you over the bridge that Jishat’s bringing. Then I’ll take the bridge back inside and go and get Jishol. Sound like a plan?”

When they arrived at the entrance, Jishat had indeed brought back what looked like a section of wall, perhaps a couple of feet wide. They were holding it by essentially folding their body around it, so the plank jutted out either side of them.

“Fantastic,” said Yaz. “Here, let me give you a - uh, let me help.”

It was much easier for her to manipulate the plank with her limbs. Opposable thumbs really were useful. She laid the plank over the gap at the cave entrance. “Right, who’s first?”

The children slid across easily. The teacher had to manipulate their body slightly in order to fit on the bridge: they were wider than the plank, so they had to squeeze themselves into a thinner shape to make their way across. Still, rescue mission completed - mostly.

“Jishat, I’m going to have to go back for Jishol,” Yaz said. “They were a bit further in than the others, so I’ll need to take the bridge.”

Jishat’s tentacles waved again - definitely a nod. “Thank you, Yaz.”

“Just doing my job,” Yaz said, and meant it. Some aspects of policing she wasn’t keen on - parking disputes, drunk and disorderlies, the disloyal twinges she felt whenever the topic of racism came up - but this was what she had dreamed of when she was a kid. Bringing a lost child and their parent back together. This was what she wanted to achieve.

“I’ll go back and get them now,” she said. “Can you guys wait here for me?”

“Of course,” said Jishat. “We will see you shortly.”

So Yaz hoisted the plank up under her arm. It was fairly heavy, and she settled it on her hip. “See you in a bit!” she said cheerily, and set off back into the mountain.

She retraced her steps to the rehearsal space, and from there it was only a short distance to the missing pupil, but with two more cracks in the floor along the way. Jishol was turquoise in colour, like their parent, but with darker shades of blue rippling over their surface as they quivered in fear. “Who are you?” they demanded.

“It’s alright,” Yaz said gently. “My name’s Yaz. I’m here to get you out. Look, I’ve got a bridge here, we can get you across the gap. I’ve already found the rest of your class, they’re safely outside now. Come on, it’s not far.”

Jishol drew back, huddling against the back wall of the cavern. “I’m scared.”

“I know, sweetheart, it’s been a scary day,” said Yaz. “Look, why don’t I come across to you, show you it’s safe?”

She set the plank down and walked over it. “There you go, easy peasy.” She moved towards the child and crouched down to their level. “Your name’s Jishol, is that right?”

Their tentacles were starting to relax into soft waves. “Yes.”

“Your friends are waiting for you, Jishol. Come on. Let’s go.”

It took another few seconds, but gradually Jishol started moving. Yaz straightened up, ready to go first, and then -

~

Ryan staggered. “What was that?”

The Doctor straightened up. “Another bomb!” she shouted. “Can’t be far, come on!”

~

Graham, by the doorway into the council chamber, turned at the great rumbling crash behind him.

A sheet of crystal the size of a double-decker bus was sliding down the mountainside, glinting and shining at its top, and, lumbering, crumbling, shattering at its bottom, creating a billowing, glittering dust cloud. He couldn’t see the bottom of the mountain from where he was, but hoped like hell there was no one in its path.

“Landslide!” he yelled. “Is everyone still inside?”

~

Jishol screamed, a high shrieking vibration like a mosquito, as the ground gave way beneath their feet. Yaz panicked, imagining falling forever, but landed in a heap only a couple of seconds later, Jishol directly on top of her.

The bridge tumbled past them both, falling into the deep chasm directly in front of them.


	2. Chapter Two

The Doctor beat Ryan easily to the next bombsite, or as close as they could get. He skidded to a stop next to her, coughing and blinking furiously at the dust in the air, and asked, “What the hell?”

Because they weren’t the first ones there. A small group of smaller Jasapods were wailing in an alarming buzzing noise, waving their tentacles like mad. There were two adults with them, one blue and one golden yellow.

Most disturbingly, the entire group was coated in what had to be dust from the landslide, and some were even impaled with shards of gemstone. Small gelatinous blobs surrounded the group, and Ryan realised with horror that these were actually parts of the Jasapods.

“You must be Yaz’s school trip,” said Ryan. “Oh my god, are you guys okay?”

“We’re fine,” said the yellow Jasapod. “No one’s lost too much mass, right children?”

Still horrifying, but the Doctor was striding forward. “Where’s Yaz?” she demanded. “The human who came to find you, where is she?”

“She went back for Jishol!” piped up one of the little ones. The outline of their body was blurred from how much they were shaking. “We got out before the second bang, but Jishol’s still in there!”

“Call her,” the Doctor told Ryan.

“Way ahead of you,” he muttered, already scrolling to her number. Her phone rang a couple of times, and then the call connected.

“Ryan!”

“Yaz, oh my god, are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m-”

But the phone beeped in his ear. He looked down at the screen: call disconnected. Almost immediately, Yaz was calling back. He answered.

“Yaz, what’s going on?”

But before she could say anything, another beep, and another disconnection. Ryan was still staring at the phone, wondering what he should do, when he received the first in a string of texts.

_ Looks like the signal’s naff in here _

_ I’m stuck in a cave with one of the kids, can’t walk out because there’s a massive crack in the floor _

_ We’ve fallen down a level too so I’m not even sure how we’d get back out _

_ Definitely need a bridge, I'd say 2.5 metres to be safe _

_ We’re okay though, no injuries. Tell Jishat, turquoise, parent of the kid _

Ryan showed the screen to the Doctor. She read the messages in an instant and spun back round to the kids.

“Good news, Jishol’s alright,” she said to the group. “They’re stuck inside with Yaz though. We’re going to need to find another way to get to them.”

Without further ado, she snatched Ryan’s phone from his hand and started texting at alarming speed. She was still talking to the Jasapods. “Is there anyone who’s an expert on the caves and tunnels of the mountains? We’re gonna need a map of some sort to get them out.”

“Yes,” said the yellow Jasapod, the teacher. “If we go back to the town - Gachal would know, or maybe Beshot.”

“We met Beshot,” said the Doctor, glancing up from the phone screen. “Runs the tourist information, right? Who’s Gachal?”

“One of the learned,” said the teacher. “They’ve studied the mountain and its composition for decades.”

“Very clever,” the blue Jasapod agreed. Jishat, this must be. “Gachal speaks often in our councils. They could find Jishol and Yaz.”

“Great,” said the Doctor, “let’s get going!” She almost threw Ryan’s phone back to him, then clearly stopped herself and handed it over. He looked at what she had written.

_ Hi yaz doctor here stay calm will come for you asap crystalline structure of mountain stopping signal text back with phone battery level do you have any water do you have good airflow close all your apps keep texting ryan every half hour _

That was… scary. Yaz was already typing back though, and his phone pinged a moment later.

_ Sixty percent battery, no water, can’t feel a breeze but large cavern above so not worried about oxygen. I’m on power saver mode, will text on the hour then every half hour after and I’ll let you know my battery level. Good luck out there! _

Ryan sent back a thumbs up emoji and looked up to see the Doctor waiting for him, the Jasapods already sliding slowly away from the mountain. He read the message out to her.

“Water bottles,” she muttered. “Next time, water bottles. Right, come on!”

~

Graham saw Ryan and the Doctor before they saw him. He waved in their general direction and they hurried over.

“What have you found out?” the Doctor demanded.

Graham flipped open his notebook. “Well, I haven’t got any suspects, but I’ve got two contentious issues recently.”

The Doctor raised her eyebrows impatiently.

“Well, first up you’ve got the anti-immigration sentiment,” he said. “Some of the people are a bit worried that the new arrivals are killers - not, like, murderers,” he added hastily. “Just people who eat animal products or wear leather shoes or what have you. The other one went over my head a bit - some sort of export issue. They don’t do much trade, what with the lack of stuff, but they do export rocks from the mountain.”

Ryan and the Doctor looked at each other in alarm.

“That’s what the bomb was!” said Ryan. “Rocks from the mountain, all mixed together.”

“Eh?”

“A volatile chemical mixture, probably from the gases contained in the rocks,” the Doctor explained. “So who are they selling them to?”

“But the bomb was by the landing pad,” Ryan reminded her. “Maybe it is the racists. Animal rights activists. Whichever.”

His phone buzzed, and he checked it. “Still okay,” he said to the Doctor. “Fifty seven per cent.”

“What now?” asked Graham.

“Yaz’s phone battery,” said Ryan. “She’s texting every half hour. She got trapped inside the mountain with one of the kids.”

“Poor love,” said Graham. “She’s alright though?”

“Yeah, no injuries, she said. Just trapped.”

He tapped something quickly on his phone, which made the small noise of a message sent, and then tucked it back in a pocket. One of the Jasapods was making their way over to them.

“Hello Doctor, Ryan,” they said, and Graham belatedly recognised Beshot from the tourist information office. “Did you find the children?”

“They’re just behind us,” said the Doctor. “Except one, still stuck inside with Yaz.”

Beshot’s tentacles wavered. “But they’re not hurt?”

“No, not badly,” said the Doctor. “Beshot, I need to find someone called Gachal, I’m told they can help us find Yaz and Jishol. Can you introduce me?”

“Of course,” said Beshot. Their tentacles were still wavering. “They spend much time out around the mountain, but they should be somewhere here…”

They stretched up and trilled: a high-pitched noise, a sharp vibration of the tentacles, quickly picked up by others, so the noise and the movement travelled away from them and then, as if bouncing off the walls, the signal came back towards them. The Doctor watched, fascinated. It was language, certainly, but not language of the sort that the TARDIS would translate for them. It was more like the dances of bees, communicating fairly complicated concepts, but in as simple a way as possible. Another place she’d have to take Chomsky, once she’d figured out the best place in his timeline to pluck him from.

“Over there,” said Beshot.

Gachal was short and pale pink, darkening to fuschia at their base. “Hello,” they said. “I hear you need someone to help retrieve the missing child.”

“And my friend, Yaz,” said the Doctor. “She went in to find them, got stuck.”

“Well then, best get started!” they said, their tone cheerful. “I know that mountain like my own tentacles, we’ll get them out.”

The Doctor smiled. “That’s what we like to hear! Can I come help? I’ve got a sonic screwdriver, might be able to add to your information a bit.”

Gachal’s tentacles curled and extended again. “I can’t say I’m familiar with that word, but of course you’re welcome. Never turn down an opportunity to learn, that’s what I say.”

“We’ll keep asking around in here,” said Graham.

Ryan nodded. “And I feel like we should speak to the missing kid’s… er, parent? You know, Jishat.”

“Jishat’s one of our Vice Presidents,” said Beshot.

“Ooh, that’s interesting,” said the Doctor. “Is it? Or maybe not. Is it?” She shook her head. “Ryan, Graham, you work out whether or not that’s interesting. Gachal, let’s go.”

They headed out to the mountain. The Doctor found herself impatient at the slow pace, just as Yaz had earlier, and had to make an effort to slow down.

“Tell me more about you, Gachal,” she said. “Jishat said you were one of the learned. That sounds pretty cool.”

“A complimentary way to put it,” Gachal demurred. “I just love this place. Ever since I was tiny and all my classmates were interested in… I suppose you’d say they were interested in expressing our history, performing it. I just wanted to take it all in.”

“History?” asked the Doctor. “I got the impression you were more of a geographer. Literally, today.”

“They’re so intertwined,” said Gachal. “The land shapes who we are. This mountain, it created us, in a very real sense. We evolved from its depths. And it’s a guide to the whole planet, did you know that? Each facet, each colour, points towards a different zone, flush with different gases and lifeforms. That’s how we set up the refugee programme without having colonised the rest of the planet. We listen to the people, what they need, and then we listen to the mountain. It shows us where to place them.”

“That’s beautiful,” said the Doctor.

Gachal hummed. “It was,” they said

Because now the mountain was in view, and beautiful was not the first word that sprang to mind. Clouds of dust coated a surface which had shone only hours before. Sheer expanses of gemstone were now jagged and uneven. Most disturbing of all, there were still globules of Jasapod tissue strewn near the entrance to the rehearsal space where Yaz had gone in.

“It will survive,” said the Doctor. “Time is such a great healer. More so for mountains than for people, I would say.”

She took out her screwdriver and pointed it at the rockface closest to them. It took her a couple of tries to find exactly the right frequency, cautious of causing another rockfall, but then she had it and the dust fell away in a single sheet, revealing gleaming amber underneath.

The deep fuschia at Gachal’s base was lightening; they were now a dusky rose. “Thank you, Doctor,” they said. “But leave it as it is for the moment. What’s more important now is Jishol and your Yaz. Time for some literal geography.”

What followed was nothing short of amazing. For a good five minutes, Gachal was fluctuating in size, growing and shrinking, making clicking noises. The Doctor watched, completely absorbed, as Gachal became their own sonar machine, sending out signals and reading them directly from their own body. Perhaps this was why Gachal seemed shorter than the other Jasapods, always making full use of their connection to the planet.

Eventually, they stabilised. “Well, I can say safely that the internal structure of the mountain has changed,” they said. “The caves aren’t resonating like they normally do.”

“That is very cool,” said the Doctor. “Wish I could do that. Without my screwdriver, anyway.”

Gachal buzzed like a wasp, up and down in pitch, perhaps like laughter. “I can’t imagine not being able to hear space. Wonderful, the diversity of life.”

The Doctor smiled. “Yeah. I can get behind that.”

“Anyway, the good news is that I think we can remap the tunnels fairly easily,” said Gachal. “I would ask for your help, but I don’t think I’ll understand your screwdriver. I’ll need a few others out here and we can work out a way towards Jishol. We should be able to reach them in a few hours.”

“That’s brilliant,” said the Doctor. “Gachal, I can’t thank you enough.”

“You don’t need to thank me,” Gachal said. “We’re protecting life. Let’s head back and fetch some of my friends, and then we can start work. Although - you go on ahead, you’re quicker than me. I’ll see if I can at least find some likely entrances on my own and then join you.”

“Who should I ask for?”

Gachal gave her several names, all with that same sort of two-syllable structure with some sort of central fricative and the Doctor muttered them under her breath, committing them to memory. “See you in a bit,” she said, and hurried off.

Poor Yaz, she thought as she jogged back towards the town. Stuck out of the action, unable to do anything to get herself out, completely reliant on her friends. It was the sort of situation the Doctor would absolutely hate. Still, the best she could do was find these Jasapods, find Yaz a route out, and work out what on Jasapol was going on. Possibly that one first. Whichever order those events decided to unroll.

She was just at the outskirts of the town, back in the deserted suburbs, when the third blast hit.

She skidded to a halt. From the city centre she could hear, or perhaps even feel, the buzzing of distressed Jasapods. Behind her, the crack and crumble of rock and gemstone. What to do - go back to check on Gachal? Find the other Jasapods and head back to start mapping the tunnels again?

Gachal was so in tune with the mountain, she reasoned, they would have been well-equipped to move away from any danger zone. Yaz and Jishol didn’t have that option. She ran on, towards the town hall.

~

This third explosion was smaller than the others. At first, Graham wasn’t even convinced that it was a proper explosion - it just sounded like a car backfiring, or a single loud crack - but the Jasapods around them were quickly descending into panic. Most of the reaction was a high pitched buzzing, but as Graham looked at individual Jasapods he could make out some words: “Another one!” “Oh holy life!”

Ryan’s curse was somewhat more colourful and Graham tamped down the instinct to tell him off.

“They’ll be fine,” he said instead.

Ryan looked unsure, but thankfully the Doctor chose exactly that moment to prove Graham half right, hurtling into the room and physically grabbing hold of Ryan to stop herself catapulting into a clump of Jasapods. “I need - oh, what were their names - one definitely began with a D - I need people to help map out the mountain tunnels! Oh come on, come on, come on, think Doctor, oh, that was it - Vatchat, Bishal, and Dachod, anyone seen those three?”

But without seeing the speaker, the Jasapods could not understand, and in amongst the panic her query went unheeded. The Doctor locked eyes with Graham. “Grab someone who knows you,” she said. “We’ll need someone to spread the word. Quicker the better, go go go!”

Graham and Ryan shared a glance. “Best hop to,” said Graham. He fancied he was getting at least a bit better at telling the individuals apart, but it still took nearly a whole minute for him to find the green coral necklace that identified the historian, Beshot, bobbing about right on the other side of the room. He pointed it out to Ryan. “There!”

They hurried over. Graham nearly collided with a jade green Jasapod and had to dodge awkwardly around them, in a manoeuvre better suited to someone a couple of decades younger. “Sorry!” he gasped. 

And even before they got to Beshot, a cry was going up around them, the same wave of tentacles and trilling vibration that had found Gachal earlier. Graham twisted around and saw the Doctor standing with a turquoise Jasapod.

“That’s Jishat,” said Ryan. “The kid’s parent, the one who’s stuck with Yaz.”

“Right,” said Graham. He leaned down and rested his hands on his knees, coughing a little. “Glad I used all that energy.”

Beshot had spotted them and met them now in the middle. “Are you alright?” he asked Graham. “That sound you’re making, it’s not language, is it? I don’t understand it.”

“What, the coughing?” Graham asked. He straightened up. “No, it’s a - ah, a reflex. Clears your throat. My old lungs are suffering with all this running around, that’s all.” He thumped his chest by way of explanation.

“Lungs?”

It was hard to read shock on a creature without a face, but Ryan was sure that was what they were seeing. Beshot’s tentacles extended sharply into the air and they drew back a foot.

“Yeah,” said Graham. “Er, they’re sort of, er, organs we use to breathe. Is there something wrong with that?”

Beshot’s tentacles twirled in the air. “You have a pulmonary respiratory system? All of you?”

“Yeah, I s’pose that’s what you’d call it,” said Graham.

“But you’re so good at our language!” Beshot said. “Most pulmonary creatures, they can’t make the sounds for our language, we have to learn to understand theirs.”

“Oh, that’s the Doctor’s ship,” Ryan explained. “It’s got a really good translation system - to us it sounds like you’re speaking English, so I guess to you it sounds like we’re speaking your language.”

But Beshot was still agitated, their tentacles making short sharp movements. “I need to speak to Jishat. Wait here, don’t leave.”

He hurried off, sliding smoothly over to the Doctor and Jishat, who were deep in conversation with the three Jasapods. Ryan edged closer to Graham.

“Bit weird,” he said. “What do you think? Prejudice against mouth-breathers?”

“No idea,” replied Graham.

But over the other side of the room, the Doctor’s head had snapped up and she was haring back towards them, pulling the sonic screwdriver from her pocket.

“Hold still,” she said, and waved it over the two of them. She checked the readings, then grabbed Ryan’s hand and buzzed it over his fingertips before holding it up to check the results again. She sighed in relief.

“What is it?” Ryan asked.

“Bit of a hazard,” she said. “Some of the mountain rocks, the red ones, turns out they contain a chemical which is a bit toxic to anything that breathes. The Jasapods hadn’t thought to warn us because they thought we were speaking their language, which is made with tissue vibrations alone rather than vibrating air over vocal cords or your species equivalent. But you’re fine!” she added hastily. “Ryan might have a bit of a sore throat over the next few days, we were out by that mountain a good ten minutes, but that’s all.”

“Blimey,” said Graham. “That’s the most literal environmental hazard I’ve ever heard of.”

“You’re telling me,” said the Doctor, but her eyes were still hard. “Ryan. How long is it since you heard from Yaz?”

Ryan’s mouth fell open. He grabbed his phone out of his pocket, fumbling the fingerprint unlock twice before he managed to get to his messages. “Last text I got from her was nearly forty minutes ago. She didn’t mention any breathing problems though. You don’t think...”

“Call her. Now.”

But the call went immediately to voicemail. “It’s not ringing,” he said. “Maybe the signal again? I’ll text her.”

_ Hey yaz text me back, worried about you _

They waited in tense silence for a minute, and then two.

“Shout as soon as you hear anything,” the Doctor said. “And stay away from that mountain! Jishat-”

But she cut herself short, because the turquoise Jasapod had drawn themselves up to their full height, stretched almost half as tall again. Their tentacles were drawn up sharply together into a single point.

“What…” said Ryan.

And then two other Jasapods were moving towards Jishat, one pink, one pale blue with a green necklace thing, and they were getting taller, too. They arranged themselves in a triangle, at the centre of which -

“Beshot,” said the blue one. “I charge you with endangering life.”

Everything stopped. Dead silence hung in the council hall, until the blue Jasapod - oh, that was President Foshol, which made the others their Vice Presidents, surely - spoke again. “I move to question you immediately.”

“I agree,” came a chorus of voices across the hall. Graham looked around and realised that practically every Jasapod had spoken. Politics by consensus, indeed.

And the crowd was melting away, sliding back to form a ring along the inside of the walls. Ryan grabbed Graham’s arm and they followed, ending up in between two deep purple Jasapods.

“Beshot,” said Foshol. “I ask you to repeat to the people what you have said to me.”

Beshot looked small and squat between the three leaders, but their voice filled the hall all the same. “I said that I did not intend to endanger life, but I did not know that the tourist Yaz had a pulmonary respiratory system. I accept that I have endangered her life.”

Graham felt faint. “I need to sit down,” he said, but there was nowhere to sit. Ryan still had a hold of his arm, and shifted closer to support him. Bless that boy.

“And Jishol?” said Jishat. “Do you accept that you have endangered the life of my child?”

Beshot did not turn. “No. I did not arrange the second or third explosions. I arranged the first, which sent the tourist Yaz into danger. It did not cause any injury. The blast was arranged to be well away from the rehearsal space, and at a time when no individual would be near the blast site. I do not accept that I endangered the life of Jishol.”

Foshol spoke up again. “Citizens, do you agree?”

This time there was muttering. Some spoke up with “I agree,” others with “I disagree.” The other Vice President took up the reins.

“Further discussion is needed before we agree,” they said. “Beshot, I ask if you know who arranged the second and third blasts.”

“I do not know,” said Beshot.

Further muttering, a low buzz around the - well, the courtroom. Then the Doctor stepped forward.

“Presidents, may I speak?”

Another time, Graham might have snorted - as if anyone could stop the Doctor speaking. But Foshol said, “You may,” and then the three Jasapods were rearranging themselves, no longer a triangle around Beshot but a diamond, with the Doctor taking the fourth point.

“Beshot, I was with you at the time when the first explosion occurred,” said the Doctor. “You said you arranged that one, right? So this is my question: do you know who actually set it off?”

Beshot shrank even further, squatting close to the ground. “I do.”

“And who was that?”

“Gachal.”

A murmur of vibration went round the room.

“Where is Gachal?” said Foshol.

“Out by the mountain,” the Doctor said. Her voice was faint. “They said they were looking for entrances, so we could go in and get Jishol and Yaz.”

Ryan looked at Graham, his eyes wide with panic. “But if they’re the bomber…”

The Doctor was already running. Graham tried to follow, but she shouted, “No, stay away from that mountain!”

And yet before she had even made it to the ring of Jasapods, a wild buzz arose, and multiple voices exclaimed: “Gachal!” “There they are!”

The Jasapod that emerged from the entrance was pink and squat. They surged forward with what would have been a purposeful stride if they’d had legs and came to join Beshot in the centre of the room, almost brushing the Doctor. She stalked behind them, fire in her eyes, and retook her position to close the diamond.

“Gachal, we are hearing a case against Beshot, and potentially against you,” said Foshol. “Did you set off the blasts at the mountain?”

“I did,” said Gachal.

The buzzing around the room hit a high pitch and subsided.

“And did you act alone in organising the second and third blasts?” asked Jishat.

Gachal straightened up. “I did.”

“And what was your target?” asked the other Vice President. “The landing pad?”

“Yes,” said Beshot, exactly as Gachal said “No.”

Beshot’s tentacles curled and extended quickly. “No?” they asked.

Gachal ignored them. “Presidents, Beshot intended to destroy the landing pad. I intended to destroy the mountain.”

“The mountain?” the Doctor echoed. “Why in the universe would you want to… unless...”

And suddenly Graham understood. “The exports,” he muttered.

“What?” said Ryan, but the President was speaking.

“We take this in order,” said Foshol. “Gachal, rejoin the circle.”

And so they did, sliding back into the crowd. The others around them drew back, leaving them in a little island of isolation. The Doctor watched them go, but the Presidents all leaned in towards Beshot, focused.

“Beshot, you do not accept that you endangered life,” said Jishat. “I leave aside for the moment the question of my child’s life. I ask instead whether you consider that the lives of our refugees might be endangered without access to our planet.”

“They are not our refugees,” said Beshot. “What precedent do you set, if you claim that we must care about the lives of all beings throughout the galaxies? It would logically follow that we must do something about it, leave Jasapol to intervene in other planets’ affairs, prevent as much danger as we could in all the universe. It’s impossible.”

“These are old arguments,” said the pink Vice President. “We discussed this when we first responded to the call for aid. We agreed that our responsibility would begin with being asked for help.”

“I know, and I conceded before,” Beshot acknowledged. “But we should have revisited that decision with each new group arriving. Instead, aliens whose cultures we barely know arrive, some of them with no respect for life, some who have survived only by consuming the lives of others.”

“But these are refugees!” said the Doctor. “Don’t you review their applications before they arrive, don’t you look into their backgrounds?”

“We do,” confirmed Jishat.

“Then with your vaunted respect for life, why are you not seeking to respect the lives of those who need a home to survive?”

“Doctor, subside,” said Foshol. “This is not your place.”

“Right, sorry,” she said, but it was with clear impatience and Graham winced.

“I see it like this,” said the pink Vice President. “Citizens, have we agreed that our responsibility begins with being asked for help?”

“We have agreed,” came the echo.

“Would the loss of the landing pad prevent us aiding those who we have agreed to help?”

“We have agreed.”

“Then I believe, Beshot, that you have acted in a way that could endanger life.”

Foshol took up the questioning. “Citizens, do you agree?”

“I agree.”

Graham wasn’t sure, but he thought the chorus was quieter this time. People had abstained, perhaps, but no one had spoken against.

“And so we move on,” said Foshol. “Gachal, come forward.”

They did.

“You intended to destroy the mountain,” said Jishat. “My child is inside that mountain, and you knew them to be inside the mountain. You knew that all of our children were inside the mountain earlier today, and you knew that Jishol remained within before you set off the third blast.”

Gachal remained short and squat. Their tentacles barely moved, calm and relaxed. “I did.”

“Then you agree that you endangered life,” Jishat pressed. Their outline was trembling, but Gachal remained stolid.

“I disagree.” They stretched up now, raising their tentacles so all could see. “I know the mountain better than any Jasapod here. I know its caves and tunnels, I know every rock and stalactite within. I knew exactly where I could set off explosions so no lives would be endangered.”

“And yet Jishol remains trapped,” said President Foshol.

“But not irretrievable,” Gachal insisted. “I can find them, and we can extract them. It is convenient that the Doctor and her friends were here to help, but we would have reached the children ourselves. Slower, yes, but we could have done it. But this council must stop selling poison, or the mountain must be destroyed. Those are the two options.” And now there was emotion in their voice, and their tentacles were starting to twitch and flicker as they spoke. “Everyone here knows how I love this place, how I love the mountain. But today, it has become toxic. And it cannot continue to be exploited like this. We cannot use it to kill.”

President Foshol was agitated now, their pale blue body darkening almost to navy. “Be careful what accusations you make, Gachal.”

“Ha!” Gachal shouted. “This council, these presidents, this populace - you all are hypocrites! You say that life is holy, you say that it must never be endangered, and then you debase the mountain which birthed us, collect rocks filled with gas, a gas you know can endanger life, and you sell it! You sell it without asking for any guarantee that it will not be used on living creatures, not even a guarantee that it will not be used on sentient creatures!”

“We sell our gemstones only to those who seek decoration, not pesticide,” said the pink Vice President. “And only then to peaceful nations.”

“But without asking them to guarantee that they will not sell it on,” Gachal insisted. “You do not know how many have been killed by the products of Jasapol.”

And from one end of the hall, a Jasapod spoke up: “They’re right. I agree.”

And that in turn was echoed around the room, “I agree, I agree,” although some still spoke up with “I disagree.”

“Citizens!” called Foshol. “We do not discuss this now. We discuss Gachal’s actions.”

“You cannot separate them,” said Gachal. “You said earlier that our responsibility to other planets begins with being asked to help. Well, I say that if that is our precedent, then if we sell a product to a planet, we have a responsibility to the lives of its inhabitants. I said as much before, but this council decided it would go on selling poison anyway, with only the most inadequate checks. I will not be the only Jasapod to protest this. I will not be alone!”

“No,” said the Doctor. “But I really, really hope you’re the only one who will do it by murdering others.”

Gachal’s tentacles twitched again. “Jishol will be fine, they will be retrieved easily if you just let me-”

“I’m not talking about Jishol,” said the Doctor. “My friend, Yasmin. She’s got a pulmonary respiratory system.”

And this time Gachal flinched, their whole body contracting to two thirds its original size and expanding again. “No,” they said.

“Oh yes,” said the Doctor. “Lungs, and bronchi, and a windpipe. Such a delicate system, so easily disrupted. Her species - you won’t know this, but they’re so fragile. They’re held up by bones which break, they are contained by skin which tears, and every time that happens, it hurts. You don’t have that concept, but imagine sadness. Imagine anger, and sadness, and betrayal, and a distracting vibration, which won’t let you hear anything else. Every human knows that sensation, they know they’re risking it just by existing every day. They don’t just have to worry about losing their life, they have to worry about their life being disrupted, forever, by damaging themselves. They don’t just regrow if they lose a limb. They have to work at surviving without it, in pain. In sadness, in anger, in betrayal.”

The courtroom was silent. Gachal was shrinking steadily, now smaller in size than any other Jasapod in the room.

“Yasmin knew she was risking that, when she went into that mountain. She knew, and she still went in, because just like you she knew that protecting the lives of children was vital. Essential. She went into that mountain to save all the children who were trapped there because of your bomb. You told me yourself that it will take hours to reach them, hours for that gas to destroy her respiratory system and choke her to death. So unless there’s been some sort of miracle, you have murdered Yasmin Khan.”

“No. No!”

“You say you hold all life holy,” the Doctor pressed. “You said it to me, earlier, you called the diversity of life wonderful. But you took no care to preserve it. Yes, you’re a genius, you can map your surroundings, you had faith that you would be able to find the young people of your community. But the fact remains that if it weren’t for Yaz, an alien who happened to be there to help, those children might never have been retrieved. You might have known exactly where they were, and you might never have been able to get to them.

“And if Yaz hadn’t been there to help,” the Doctor added, “she would still be alive.”

The sound the Jasapod made did not translate into English. Ryan felt it like an intense vibration in his sternum, like being too close to the speakers at a concert. He wasn’t crying, not yet. He felt like he was in shock, his whole body fuzzy like static electricity.

The Doctor stepped away from the diamond, addressing the full courtroom. “Go back to your councils,” she said. “Make petitions, collect opinions, and for the love of life come up with  _ solutions _ rather than just stating your problems! Here’s one for you, Beshot: ask the refugees to switch to tofu! It’s the thirty second century, people have developed meat substitutes for even the most carnivorous species by now!”

A low thrum around the room told Ryan that this was new information.

“And you know what Gachal?” said the Doctor. “I happen to agree with you. If this council has made the decision to care about lives outside of this planet, lives it has the power to directly affect, then it should care where it’s sending its pesticides. My recommendation to this council would be to discuss this issue again, and suspend exports until a final decision is made. But in the meantime, I’ve got a child and the dead body of my friend to find,” she said. “Graham, Ryan, stay here. Anyone who wants to help, come with me. President, I leave them to your justice.”

And with that she stormed out.

A few Jasapods followed her immediately, but more sedately - the yellow schoolteacher leading the pack, Jishat following close behind. Foshol raised their voice.

“Citizens we move first to protect life. We move second to correct those who sought to endanger it. Gachal, Beshot, you will remain here. We will reconvene later.”

The circle broke immediately. This time, Gachal and Beshot were swarmed by other Jasapods, and Graham lost sight of them immediately. Next to him, Ryan was clutching his phone. “She’s not really dead,” he said, but it was a question more than a statement. “The Doctor was just saying that for show. Wasn’t she?”

Graham breathed in, once, twice. “I don’t know, son,” he said.

One of the purple Jasapods beside them buzzed. “I’m afraid it is likely,” they interjected. “That gas, it shreds the - oh, what’s it called? The lining of the breathing tube?”

“Mucosa,” said another. “So it stops the creature breathing well. And it has a toxin which affects other systems, like brains, if enough is absorbed. How long has it been?”

“I dunno. Maybe - can’t be more than two hours,” answered Ryan.

The two Jasapods had their tentacles curled close to their body. “With the disturbance caused by the explosions and the rockfall, the gas will be everywhere. It would only take… perhaps an hour?”

"Maybe up to three with good airflow," the other suggested.

“But she was texting!” said Ryan. “Right up until about forty five minutes ago, she was fine.”

Graham shook his head. "The Doctor said it would take hours to get to them. Even if she's fine now…"

The two purple Jasapods wavered, their blob-like shapes fluctuating and rippling for a moment. “Perhaps your species is hardier than the Doctor made it sound,” said the first.

“All the places we’ve seen them, we must be the cockroaches of the universe,” said Graham. It was a weak joke, he knew, but Ryan didn’t even acknowledge it, staring at his phone.

“She can’t be dead,” he muttered. “She can’t be.”

The phone remained stubbornly silent. The sky outside started to darken. After a little while, Graham hustled Ryan back to the TARDIS to grab some food and a drink. They skirted away from the mountain as they did so, but they could see the Doctor in the distance, with the group of Jasapods spread out a few yards apart, shrinking and growing as they attempted to find a safe way into the mountain.

Ryan kept checking his phone, watching as Yaz missed another half-hour check-in. And another. And another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's okay i promise, i don't forget to tag major warnings


	3. Chapter Three

Yaz could really have done with a glass of water. Five and a half hours was a long time to be stuck in a cave.

Mind, that time was a guess on Yaz’s part, her phone having been smashed maybe a few hours ago. Until that point, she had been fairly okay staying put with Jishol behind the chasm that had opened up between them and the cave entrance. Anyway, even if she could have leapt the few metres to safety, of which she was highly doubtful, Jishol definitely couldn’t, and Yaz really didn’t want to leave them alone. Plus, Ryan had been reading her texts, responding with a thumbs up emoji each time, so she knew they were all still out there looking for her. Sure, she was trapped, but she’d been in stickier situations. She could cope.

That outlook hadn’t lasted long. For a start, Yaz seemed to be coming down with something. She had a headache slowly building, and an annoying tickle in her throat. She found that she lost track of what she was saying occasionally, and she was starting to shiver. A fever, maybe? She was looking forward to getting back to the TARDIS and seeing what the Doctor would say if she asked for some good old-fashioned Lemsip.

That was assuming they were still looking for her.

More importantly, the third explosion had caused a pretty significant rockfall, and both Yaz and Jishol had been injured. For Yaz, it was a broken phone, scraped head and bruised back, but a full quarter of Jishol’s singular, slug-like foot had been struck clean off, shattering into blobs of turquoise gel now scattered across the floor. Luckily, Jasapods didn’t seem to experience pain in the same way that creatures on Earth did, but Jishol was still fairly traumatised by the loss of a significant part of their body mass. Even now, hours on, their upper tentacles were shivering, coiled close to their body.

“Hey, Jishol, can you focus on me?” Yaz said. Her voice was hoarse; she cleared her throat. “Come on. Tell me about something you learnt in school, yeah?”

“Um.” One tentacle unfurled. “I can tell you about these caves? We learned about them before we started rehearsing here.”

Yaz was not convinced this was the best way of getting the kid’s mind off their current situation, but they had already covered Jishol’s family history (Jishat was their only parent, commonly abbreviated to 'pare' in this genderless society, and had a boring job in the civil service), ambitions for the future (they wanted to be a dancer), a few tales about Yaz’s background and her travels with the Doctor (firmly edited to be child appropriate) - honestly, she was struggling for new conversational topics at this point. “Sure.” The word cracked around a cough; Yaz cleared her throat again. “Go ahead.”

“Well, they’re made out of a mineral called -” and here Yaz heard a sound which was clearly untranslatable “- which is formed under the planet crust. They’re denser when they’re under pressure, like the ones in the ground or in the walls, and it’s the pressure which makes them glow like that. That’s why the floor is bright red and the walls get more yellow and dull as they go up to the ceiling. Those stalactites - look, up there, you can see them now the last rocks fell away - they’re practically hollow.”

It was disconcertingly like being trapped in a cold fire, if you asked Yaz, but they didn’t seem to have fire on this planet so she decided against trying to explain that simile to Jishol. Anyway, it was kind of beautiful. She looked up at the newly-revealed stalactites. They had barely any glow to them at all, and were the palest shade of cream. They also seemed to be quivering. Yaz sucked a nervous breath in between her teeth, which made her cough.

“So if they’re hollow, do they have just air in them?” she asked, watching them apprehensively. If there was another tremor and they fell, those points could shear off even more of Jishol’s body, she was sure.

“No, it’s a different sort of gas. Teacher said it can be dangerous to life, but it doesn’t endanger anything that lives here. Mostly just animals that breathe, with throats and lungs and stuff. I think the council sells it to other planets, sometimes, but Pare doesn’t like that.”

Ah. The quivering was now doubly ominous. As was her cough.

“Right. I can see why,” said Yaz. She took a deep breath, and immediately regretted it. “Okay, Jishol, I think we’re going to have to start thinking about moving ourselves. I’m going to see if I can climb round the gap in the floor, and then we can have a look around for something to make a bridge for you.”

Jishol’s tentacles extended sharply upright, tense and still. “But what if more rocks fall and you’re not here?”

Yaz crouched down to her level. “Listen, Jishol. I’m one of those species that have to breathe to stay alive. All those rockfalls, I bet they’ve released some of that gas, and that’s why I’ve been coughing.”

“Coughing?” Jishol echoed. It wasn’t quite the way the word should be said, which made Yaz think maybe they were just repeating the sounds, that the concept was untranslatable into the Jasapod language. She demonstrated instead, and then couldn’t stop. She turned away, hacking coughs into her hands, wondering if the irritation in her throat would make her absorb more of the gas. When she finally managed to calm her breathing and turn back to Jishol, their tentacles were coiled up again.

“Oh.”

“So the longer we stay here, the less likely it is I can help you if there’s more rockfalls,” Yaz said. “What do you think? Is it okay if I try to go and get some help?”

Jishol took a moment to think about it, and when they spoke, their voice was very small and shaky. “Okay. But you gotta find my pare.”

“That’s a deal.” She stood up. “Right. Here we go.”

The rocks along the wall ranged from a deep amber gold at ground level to a pale primrose as they got above Yaz’s eye level, maybe twice Jishol’s height. The fact that the previous rockfalls hadn’t killed her yet was lending Yaz a bit of confidence about the potency of this gas, as was the fact that, well, she’d been travelling with the Doctor for a few months now (probably) and she wasn’t dead yet. Still, she’d felt a lot more blasé about being trapped in a cave before Jishol had dropped that tidbit of information. She hoped it was just the stalactites which were actually hollow.

She huffed - not a useful thought, Yaz - and reached up.

The rocks were quite smooth under her grip, which wasn’t massively useful, and provided practically no useful footholds, which was worse. The chasm she was trying to circumvent might not have been all that deep, but the deep red glow emanating from below made it hard to tell. Yaz certainly couldn’t identify a bottom to it.

Right hand first, to a yellow shelf around head height. Right foot, to an orange divot. Just like Twister. Left hand took longer, ending up nearer chest level. But moving her left foot would have meant leaving the safety of solid ground, and Yaz could tell that she would fall immediately if she tried it. If she had spikes in her shoes or some professional rock climbing tools, she might have stood a chance, but on the other hand, that would have released more gas. Carefully, she shifted back to where she started.

“No good,” she said to Jishol. “Guess you’re stuck with me.”

Another bout of coughing took her. When it finished, she was distinctly woozy, and Jishol was sort of crouched-slash-compressed next to her. She’d fallen to her knees at some point, Yaz realised.

“Sorry,” she whispered to Jishol.

“It’s okay,” Jishol whispered back.

They sat there for a few minutes in silence while Yaz desperately tried to think of a way out of this mess. They’d checked for back entrances a few dozen times in hour one, along with shouting periodically for help. Staying in contact with civilisation via Ryan had been their best bet, until that option was taken away.

Yaz was starting to wonder if she should give Jishol any final messages to relay to her friends when finally -

“Hello? Is there anyone in there?”

For a second, Yaz and Jishol just stared at each other, and then Yaz was scrambling to her feet. “Doctor! It’s me, I’m here with a young child. Sorry for the radio silence, my phone broke.”

“Yaz! Right, I’m coming to get you. You stay put.”

Yaz felt faint, either from relief or lack of oxygen. Probably both. She sent up a quick prayer of thanks, and then turned back to Jishol. “You hear that? That’s my best friend, she’s found us. Want to bet your parent’s with her?”

Jishol shivered. “Maybe. It’s dangerous.”

“Yeah, but they’re your pare. They came right up to the mountain with me earlier to try and find you. If they’ve not come in this cave, they’re gonna be right outside, I bet you.”

A clatter of footsteps and debris announced the Doctor’s arrival into view. She skidded to a halt and took a second, a smile blossoming slowly on her face. Even from this distance, she was a beautiful sight.

“Hello, you!”

“Alright there, Doctor?” Yaz called. “Where’s Ryan and Graham?”

“Peachy! They’re back in the town hall, bit hairy out here for humans. Watch out for the stalactites.”

“Jishol explained.”

“Jishol! Oh, Jishol, your pare’s been looking for you! Jishat, come round here a bit!”

A few people rounded the corner, clearly travelling more sedately than the Doctor. Immediately Jishol’s tentacles flushed dark green and they let out a gurgle of happiness. “Yaz, Yaz, that’s my pare!”

And there indeed was Jishat, greener than they had been outside the mountain, and shorter too, squatting close to the ground. Their tentacles were waving wildly, and Jishol’s waved right back.

Yaz couldn’t help but smile. She meant to express her happiness for Jishol, but the words caught, and she was wracked with another coughing fit. She doubled over, crouching down this time before she could fall. She could vaguely hear the Doctor shouting instructions to the crowd.

“Thatchol, quick as you can, please, that was a sickness symptom. Shallow breaths, Yaz, we’re bringing in a bridge.”

“Can I help you?” Jishol asked.

“No thank you, sweetie,” said Yaz. She took a few breaths, fighting the instinct to draw air deep into her lungs. “Can you just tell them to be careful, there’s some stalactites up there which look ready to fall.”

Jishol repeated the instruction, projecting their little voice across the gap as well as a creature without lungs could manage, and adding “but still be quick please!”

It took another few minutes for the bridge to be set in place, by which time Yaz had control of her breathing again. Either Yaz had under-reported the breadth of the gap to be traversed, or it had widened since she was last able to communicate with Ryan, because the plank was only just long enough. There were perhaps ten inches of overhang on each end.

“Right, you’re going first,” Yaz said to Jishol. She looked around at the scattered blobs which had previously made up Jishol’s foot. “Maybe do a couple of laps of this space first? We’ve been staying still a long time.”

There were mutters from the other end of the cave as Jishol took this advice. All the impressions Yaz had got of this place was that the population was very friendly, but she took a moment to hope that she wasn’t about to be blamed for Jishol’s shrunken body.

“I’m ready,” Jishol said.

“Take it nice and slow,” the Doctor called. “I’m holding this end down, and Yaz will get the other.”

This took an awkward bit of shuffling to get Jishol on the bridge, given the lack of space for maneuvering, but they got there. Jishol inched across, squatting low to stretch out their remaining foot as much as they could. There was complete silence from the group beyond the chasm, but Jishol didn’t waver, and was soon being ushered onto safe ground and towards their parent. The two of them pushed together, entwining their tentacles and sticking together with a slightly liquid sound.

“Alright, Yaz, your go.”

Yaz closed her eyes. “I think I’m going on all fours.”

“Good idea. Grip the edges. Slow as you like, Yaz, you’ve got time.”

“Mm.”

She opened her eyes, moved her hands forwards to grip the sides of the bridge, and started shifting forward. The plank was fairly sturdy, but still bowed slightly under her weight as she moved gradually away from the edge.

“That’s it, Yaz, nice and gentle. Keep coming towards me.”

Yaz’s eyes were watering and her head was spinning. She had to pause and rest, sitting on her heels and lowering her forehead to the surface of the bridge.

“Keep it coming, Yaz. You can do it.”

She didn’t bother arguing. Right hand, left hand, right leg, left leg. Repeat. Right hand, left hand, right leg, left leg. And again.

“Well done, you’re nearly here. Smooth as you can, Yaz.”

Smooth. Yes, the bridge was shifting under her, and if she looked up she could see the Doctor’s white-knuckled grip, trying to keep it in place. “Doctor-”

“I know, Yaz, but you’re nearly here. Couple more feet and I can grab you.”

What else was there to do but keep moving? Right hand, left hand, right leg, left leg. Right hand, left hand, right leg, left leg. Right hand, left hand, right leg -

The bridge shifted and Yaz froze.

“Doctor. I’m going to have to jump.”

“Okay. I’m right here.”

She stood in centimetres. Each finger relaxed a single joint at a time; her feet were dragged beneath her as slowly as she could possibly manage; each vertebra straightened individually. Shallow breaths. Allah protect me.

She leapt - the bridge fell - she slammed straight into the Doctor and clutched her blindly, not believing the ground beneath her feet.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” the Doctor was saying. “It’s alright, Yaz, I’ve got you.”

Shattering glass behind her - no, not glass, the stalactites, and the Doctor was sweeping Yaz away, one arm around her waist and the other pulling Yaz’s arm over her shoulders. “Come on, everyone!” she was calling. “Off we go!”

Yaz stumbled blindly away, feeling keenly every place where the Doctor’s body was pressed against hers. How had she not realised how cold she felt?

“Come on, come on,” the Doctor was muttering in her ear. “Keep it moving, come on Yaz.”

Together they staggered down the winding cave tunnel ahead of Jishol and the others. It wasn’t until they were outside and well away from the entrance that the Doctor pulled her to a stop.

“Let’s have a look at you,” she said. She lifted Yaz’s hands, rubbing her fingers. “Not cyanosed, but cold, let me just -” and then the sonic was buzzing over her fingertips “- yep, your oxygen saturation is down but not too bad, still nicely above ninety. We’ll get you on some oxygen when we get back to the TARDIS, but not sure I can do anything about the toxin content, think you’re just going to feel a bit rubbish for a few days. Or weeks. Sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Yaz said. She let out a shaky breath. “Blimey, was I glad to see you.”

“Big mood.” The Doctor scrunched up her nose. “Is that just an internet thing? Do people say that out loud? Anyway - Yasmin Khan, you are a wonder and a miracle and I am so glad I found you.”

She pulled Yaz into a hug, pressing her face into Yaz’s hair. Yaz found her arms inside the Doctor’s coat, and wrapped them tightly around her waist. She closed her eyes and willed some of the stress away from her body, sending her mind out to her raw throat and aching chest, to her toes on solid ground, to her hands clutching the cotton of the Doctor’s shirt, safe now.

It was only a moment before Yaz became aware that they were being watched and turned around. Jishol was at the front of the group, their tentacles waving and flushed a happy green. Behind them was Jishat, who moved forward to address them.

“Yasmin Khan, my child has explained how you saved them from greater harm. I am most grateful, and as Vice President, I express the gratitude of all Jasapol.”

“President-Elect, no less,” the Doctor whispered in her ear. “But they’re gonna re-run the votes after the events of today, so don’t call them that yet.”

Yaz had to restrain herself from glaring at Jishol. “You and your child are to be praised for your humility. Jishol just said you were a civil servant.”

There was a general fluttering of tentacles, which Yaz thought might indicate laughter. She hoped it did, anyway.

“Jishol still thinks they can be a dancer when they grow up,” Jishat noted. “Although they may have to take some time off their dance lessons while their foot regrows, so perhaps I can persuade them to governance in that time.”

“Having just spent five hours with Jishol, I’m gonna wish you luck on that one,” said Yaz. “And tell you that of the seven styles of dance they demonstrated for me, my favourite is probably the hashayaloc.”

More tentacle fluttering - definitely laughter. Jishat joined in. “A preference I share. Well then, I should be glad of your company at one of their performances once they are recovered.”

“Ah, I’m afraid we’ve gotta be off,” the Doctor interjected. “Yaz needs a bit of medical attention, and we’ve got other places to be. But very kind of you to offer. If you don’t mind, we’ll collect our friends and head back to our ship.” She turned to Yaz. “Or I can go and get Graham and Ryan and bring the TARDIS to you if you’d prefer.”

“I’ll come with you,” Yaz said. “I’m not having you take fourteen tries to find me again.”

“Oi, cheeky!” But she was grinning. “Alright then, off we go. And if you start getting out of breath, you tell me immediately.”

Yaz rolled her eyes. “Yes, Doctor.”

“And don’t you forget it!”

It should have been a five minute walk to the town hall where Graham and Ryan were waiting, but Yaz had to call a halt a couple of times. Each time, the Doctor insisted on rechecking her sats but they held steady and, after a few minutes, Yaz was able to carry on. Each step felt like a bit of a triumph, and that was enough to keep her walking unaided.

The town hall was still packed full of Jasapods. There was a literal ripple of excitement as their small party arrived, tentacles reaching up to the ceiling in waves of Jasapods, until those at the far end of the room knew that something was up, and were stretching upwards to learn more.

“Oh my god, Yaz!”

That was Ryan, running towards them. The Doctor smiled. “I’ll go and make the formal goodbyes. Have Ryan shout if you need me.”

Ryan almost hugged her, but huffed, embarrassed, and backed off at the last minute. Graham clapped her on the shoulder.

“You alright?” Yaz asked.

Graham raised his eyebrows. “We’re grand, love, it’s you we’ve been worried about.”

“Bloody hell, we thought you were a goner,” Ryan said. “When you stopped texting back after the earthquake, Graham nearly fainted.”

“Oi, like you were any calmer,” said Graham.

“No, but they were all sure you were dead,” Ryan said. “The Doctor already had us stuck in here, once she worked out about the gas-”

“Once I mentioned me lungs and the locals started panicking, you mean.”

“-and you weren’t responding, so.”

Yaz blinked at them. “You all seriously thought I’d died?”

“Course not!” said the Doctor, and Yaz span round to face her. “Always had faith. Now come on, you lot. Jishol wants to say goodbye, and then I want to get Yaz in the med bay for a bit of oxygen.”

She took hold of Yaz’s elbow as if to guide her. Yaz raised her eyebrows, and she quickly withdrew her hand, shoving both of them into her pockets.

Jishol was waiting only a few metres away, their tentacles curling and uncurling impatiently. Yaz knelt down.

“Alright then, Jishol?”

Jishol burbled. “Yeah. Thank you, Yaz.”

“You don’t need to thank me,” Yaz said gently. “We were in that together, you and me.”

Jishol curled some of their tentacles forward, the green shifting to more of a blue. “Yeah. We were.”

“And I bet you’ll be the best dancer this planet has ever seen,” said Yaz. “Maybe we’ll come back for your big debut, how’s that?”

“That would be awesome!” they said.

“That’s a plan then,” Yaz said. She attempted to straighten up to standing but staggered, her vision blurring. A couple of seconds passed before she could focus again, and she found herself leaning against the Doctor, practically being held up.

“Not so fast,” she was saying. “You with us, Yaz?”

“Yeah,” she replied, and then thought about it. “Mostly.”

“Let’s be off then.”

This time, when the Doctor took a hold of her elbow, Yaz didn’t protest. She leaned on her without complaint, letting her take her weight. Yaz barely noticed when they were back in the TARDIS, and it was only when she heard the door click shut behind her that she thought it would have been nice to turn around and see the mountain, one last time, gleaming in the light of the pink sky.

The Doctor let go of her just long enough to bound up to the controls. “Right, I’ll just set us adrift -” with a big clunk of a lever “- there we are, come on Yaz.”

Yaz let herself be dragged through to a room she’d never seen before, but which she immediately pegged as a medical bay. Not white like a hospital, still the amber of the control room, but each surface was smooth and shining, easily wiped down. A typical couch with raised head sat against one wall, and a desk sat below a bank of flickering screens, shining through the amber wall. Yaz could see packs of latex-looking gloves stacked up beneath the desk, and odd bits of machinery were affixed to various surfaces. She could guess at some - an oxygen mask had to be part of a respirator, a dangling cuff must surely be a blood pressure machine - but others were completely incomprehensible. To complete the look, no fewer than four wheely chairs were strewn about the space.

The Doctor ignored these, pulling her to the couch and sitting her down. “Oxygen mask or nasal cannula?” she asked. “Mask’ll work quicker, but you can talk with the nasal cannula.”

“Nasal then, please.”

She held still while the Doctor fitted them, holding her breath as she came close to her face. The Doctor tucked the tubes carefully behind Yaz’s ears, brushing her hair out of the way, not meeting her eyes.

“You alright?” Yaz asked.

“Me? Oh, I’m fine and dandy, I am. Take more than poisonous gas to get me, got a respiratory bypass for that. Comes in handy for situations like this.”

“Or like being drowned as a witch?”

“That too.”

She was fiddling with some piece of machinery that wasn’t attached to the oxygen tank in the slightest.

“Doctor,” Yaz said. “Are you alright?”

She sighed, and turned back to face Yaz. “I try very very hard to be an optimist. I didn’t manage that today.”

The TARDIS pulsed gently, sound and light breathing at a steady, solid rate.

“You didn’t stop looking though,” Yaz pointed out.

The Doctor smiled. “Well, Jishol doesn’t have lungs. I didn’t bring any oxygen with me, did I?” She whirled around, back to her panel of machinery. “You got lucky because the gas is heavier than air, and you were right in front of a great big hole for it to fill up. I’m honestly amazed your sats weren’t lower than they were.”

Yaz took a second, took a breath. The oxygen was cold in her nostrils, and her throat still felt raw from all the coughing she’d done. Her head still felt woozy. She closed her eyes. “Come and sit down.”

She felt the Doctor settle next to her, and opened her eyes just to find her hand. Yaz threaded their fingers together. Her own hands still felt cold, and the Doctor turned to face her, taking both her hands and rubbing them gently.

“I was tryna comfort you,” Yaz pointed out.

The Doctor huffed. “Well then, sit there and let me take care of you.”

Yaz laughed; she couldn’t help it. "I'm fine, Doctor. You found me. And if you hadn't, it wouldn't have been your fault."

"I put you in that position, though," the Doctor argued.

"But this is what I want to do," Yaz insisted. "Help people, I mean. That's why I joined the police. That's why we split up today, because this is what I signed up for. In the Sheffield police and in the TARDIS."

The Doctor still had hold of Yaz's hands. She rubbed her knuckles with her thumbs. "I do know that. But on some level, I will always feel responsible for you. Did you ever have a hamster when you were young? And even if you went on holiday and left it with a really responsible friend, it was always in the back of your mind?"

Yaz blinked. “Is that what we are? Hamsters?”

“No! Well. I mean. Sort of?” Yaz’s eyebrows were climbing steadily, and the Doctor rushed on: “Relatively speaking, to me you’ve got the same lifespan as a hamster. I’m really old, Yaz. I don’t just look good for my age, I’m centuries old, millennia even. Side note - millennia is a really pretty word in English. Mill-en-nee-ya. Love it. But the point is - you’re not a hamster, because, as lovely as hamsters are, they’re not on the same level of sentience as humans. You can have a great chat with a hamster, but only about food or shelter or other hamsters at the present moment. Humans - you’re questioning, curious, you think beyond the moment, beyond the situation. That’s… my people, they had the intelligence to do it, but no curiosity.”

“Your people?” Yaz asked.

“Another time,” the Doctor answered, brushing aside the question with a little jerk of the head. “What I’m trying to say, Yaz, is you’re my friend. You’re my fam. And you’re definitely not a hamster.”

"I'm cute as a hamster though, right?" Yaz teased.

The Doctor screwed up her face. "Please don't start storing food in your cheeks."

Yaz laughed, and impulsively she leaned forward to put her head on the Doctor’s shoulder. "Okay, deal," she said.

The Doctor was giggling too, Yaz could feel it. She felt the Doctor rest her cheek on Yaz's head, just briefly, and then she drew back.

“Now, you sit there for a bit,” she said. “I’m just going to check we’re not drifting too far into the fifty fourth century. I’ll send Ryan and Graham in, yeah? And once your sats are back to normal, we’ll have a look at what we can do about your other symptoms.”

Yaz smiled at her. “Thanks, Doctor.”

The Doctor was already at the door, but she stopped. The smile on her face was soft, just slightly lifting her lips.

“You, Yasmin Khan, are very welcome.”

And then she was gone. Yaz took a few seconds just to breathe, feeling that cold filtered oxygen. Her head was feeling slightly clearer now. She pressed her fingertips to her thumbs to check her own capillary refill. It looked normal to her, but her first aid training needed a refresher. She would have to do her own revision when she got back to Sheffield, or by the time she came to do reaccreditation she would have forgotten stuff that she should theoretically have been tested on only a few months earlier.

Ryan popped his head round the door. “All wired up?”

“Just oxygen,” she said, indicating the cannula. “You coming in?”

He did, grabbing a wheely chair and pulling it over to the bed she was sitting on. “Y’alright, then?”

“Yeah,” said Yaz. “Bit woozy, bit tired. But alright.”

Ryan nodded. “Scary, wasn’t it?”

Yaz shrugged. “More for you than me, by the sounds of it.”

“Right, but there were bombs, Yaz,” he pointed out. “Can we not forget the bombs.”

She conceded that point to him with a tilt of the head. “Still, is it more scary than, like, a major incident back home?”

“Not all of us are police officers,” Ryan pointed out. “And anyway, if you were at a major incident in Sheffield, at least we could’ve…”

He trailed off. Yaz let the moment sit for a second, and then finished, “Recovered my body.”

“Dark,” Ryan muttered. “I was gonna say - I don’t know, we would’ve known what was going on, your phone would have been working. Your family would’ve been around. There wouldn’t be any crazy alien gas to worry about.”

“True,” said Yaz, “but if I hadn’t been there today, Jishol might never have been found. The whole school trip might not have got out. They needed someone with legs.”

“Yeah,” Ryan sighed. “That’s what the Doctor said to the Jasapods.”

“What happened?” asked Yaz. “Who was the bomber?”

And so Ryan explained, about Beshot, and Gachal, and how weird Jasapol justice seemed to him. “All they care about is life,” he said. “Not stopping pain or suffering, just protecting life. The Doctor had to explain pain to them…”

He trailed off. Yaz took another deep breath and asked. “What did they do with the bombers?”

“Listened to ‘em,” Ryan answered. “Worked out their problems. Talked about it. Made sure everyone in the room understood the best way to protect all life. That Jishat, they made this awesome speech about other cultures, and how important it was to understand them first, so they could know how best to protect the ones that asked for help. Beshot and Gachal both agreed with that, and so did everyone else. And then they just let them get on.”

“Wow,” said Yaz. “Not even, like, community service?”

“Nope.”

Her mind boggled, but then the door opened and Graham backed in, carrying a tray with three cups of tea. “Here we are, panacea.”

“Eh?” asked Yaz.

“Means cure-all,” said Ryan. “Gran used to say it.”

Graham smiled to himself, looking down at the mugs as he handed them out. Ryan’s face was harder to read. “Did you think it was weird,” he started. “When the Doctor was talking to Gachal in the council, making them realise what they’d done. She - I mean, she made it sound pretty categorical that Yaz was - y’know. But she didn’t… She didn’t look like she was grieving. She was just - sort of cold. Sort of angry, but cold.”

Graham considered. “No,” he said. “I didn’t think it was weird. You know the way she lives, she deals with the crisis, and then comes back here. If we’d actually lost you, love, I reckon we’d have seen her upset. I know she's an alien, but she's quite human at the end of the day."

Yaz thought about the casual revelation that the Doctor was literal thousands of years old, and then thought of the way she had held Yaz's hands. "Yeah," she said. "I think you're right."

~

“This is your five minute beginners’ call, that’s five minutes for beginners.”

Jishol’s nerves were climbing. It had taken five long months for their foot to regrow enough to let her dance, and another four again before they were back up to their previous standard. Now, finally, they were to dance the role that they should have performed the day before their parent became President.

And here they were, backstage only minutes before the performance. “You’ll be fine,” said Jishat.

“Pare,” Jishol whined. “You’re supposed to be in the audience.”

“And I will be!” said Jishat. “It’s the President’s prerogative to speak to the soloist before their debut.”

Jishol twined their tentacles together. “You’re making that up.”

Jishat burbled, their own tentacles fluttering. “Yes I am. But come on, let’s see some nice happy green. You’ll be beautiful. And you have some special guests in the audience.”

For a moment, Jishol didn’t understand - of course everyone they knew would be there - and then they twigged. “Yaz is here?”

“And the Doctor,” said Jishat.

“Now I’m even more nervous!” said Jishol. But the lime green was spreading over their body already, and Jishat backed off.

“I’ll go and take my place,” they said. “Dance well, my dear.”

Jishol shook off some of their nerves, feeling the reassuring heft of their own regrown body. They wobbled and jiggled, just as a dance on Earth might shake out their limbs, and then:

“Performers, this is your beginners’ call. Can we have beginners to the stage please.”

Jishol didn’t glance at the audience once. They danced with their whole life and sentience, focused entirely on the movement of their body, the play of colours over their exterior, the most delicate and most sweeping curls of their tentacles. They lost themselves in the vibrations of their fellows, sometimes swept away by the music, sometimes leading it, knowing the whole performance waited on their call and accepting that. Around them, others flexed and flowed, and Jishol met them, twined with them, parted from them. They felt at their very core the whole story of Jasapol, a story that lived in the connection between all Jasapods, and their planet.

It was perfect.

At the end of the performance, a strange staccato noise filled the auditorium along with the expected hum of applause. Jishol looked, and there they were - easy to spot with their lanky, angular bodies and bizarre, other-worldly colouring, no natural pinks or blues or greens, just odd shades of brown. They were beating their upper limbs together to make the sound, perhaps their species’ version of a cheer. Jishol thought they saw some differences in Yaz - perhaps some of the colours of her were different - but they were such small details that they couldn’t quite tell.

They looked away to find their pare. Jishat was vibrating wildly, their tentacles sticking straight up and quivering with pride. Jishol flushed green again, and rose in a graceful stretch to accept the praise of the crowd.

With everyone else focused on the stage, Jishol was perhaps the only person who saw Yaz and the Doctor leave. They edged out the back of the auditorium, and Jishol noticed that they had joined the ends of their upper limbs, entangling those thin protruberances which stuck out at the bottom, linking themselves together.

They watched the aliens go, and hummed their own small applause. They didn’t know if Yaz would be able to hear from all the way over there, but they had to say it:

“Thank you,” said Jishol.

Yaz didn't turn around, just continued on her way with the Doctor, but that was alright, Jishol thought. That was where she was supposed to be. With the Doctor, helping where she could.

They turned back to their audience, and started planning next year's show.

**Author's Note:**

> My first goal was to write an episode they could never do on TV without a significant increase of the CGI budget. Secondary goal: make Yaz and the Doctor hug. Easiest way of doing that is by nearly killing one of them. Ta-da, plot!
> 
> (If anyone has followed me here from my last fic, In Bocca Al Lupo, I promise that is the entirety of my reasoning. No philosophy this time, absolutely no deeper meaning. Just wanted to make Yaz and the Doctor hug.)
> 
> (also I spent precisely 0.2 seconds thinking about the title when I remembered I needed one, so feel free to suggest better ones in comments!)


End file.
